As schools nationwide hold drills to prepare for shooters who take out their rage on peers and teachers, the two incidents in such short succession near Buckeye have administrators, parents and law enforcement officials also wrestling with another issue: What do you do when the crime scaring kids is off campus?

“Both of these calls had absolutely nothing to do with the school,” Redding Police Lt. Jon Poletski told a group of Buckeye parents last week. “(Staff) are doing everything they can to keep your kids safe.”

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​The Shasta County Sheriff's Office bomb squad uses a robot to inspect suspicious devices at a home in north Redding on Feb. 15.
​(Photo: Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight)

The potential trauma of evacuating kids or forcing their school into lockdown is something police said they don't take lightly. But ultimately, they decided in both cases it was what they had to do.

"We took into account the school and what they had gone through before," Redding Police Capt. Bill Schueller said. "We wanted to be absolutely sure that we wanted to put these kids through another evacuation."

For some, the scary incidents — officers' non-fatal shooting of Levi Nicholson after he allegedly raised a baseball bat toward them and a suspicious device at a nearby home — were too much. A few parents posted on Facebook that they planned to pull their children out of the school, though none of them responded to the Record Searchlight’s requests to be interviewed.

And as alarming as two incidents in two weeks may be, Redding police said the neighborhood around the school is relatively safe.

Schueller said the park near the campus and all of Hiatt Drive, where the school sits, got 213 calls for service in 2016 and 156 last year. Those include potential infractions like complaints about traffic.

He didn’t say how the numbers compare to those of other neighborhoods, but noted that “compared to some other areas of town, it’s not a lot of calls for service.”

Schueller said the neighborhood around the school actually seemed to have more criminal activity when he started with the Redding Police Department years ago, though he didn’t give numbers from back then.

“I pray to God that nothing would ever happen like we’ve seen, but I can assure you, it’s not something that we take lightly.”

Gateway Unified School District Superintendent Jim Harrell

“All intents and purposes, compared to what it used to be, it’s a relatively safe neighborhood,” he said.

Still, Davis and some parents at the meeting shared concerns about the school not having a resource officer.

Gateway Unified School District Superintendent Jim Harrell said he's been trying to get one for his district, but the Shasta County Sheriff's Office has "been unable to give us that person."

"The worst call I think (police) get is something that has the word 'school,'" he said. "We may not have an SRO (school resource officer) right here, but if they hear something about 'school,' they’re coming."

Brehms said she'd also like to see a resource officer at the school, but it wouldn't do much good unless the person was available full-time.

"We’ve all seen those movies where the people just wait until the rounds are done and then they are there," she said. "And if you can do that in the movies, you can do that in real life."

After the incidents, Harrell said the district is looking into hiring private security and also installing more security cameras.

"I pray to God that nothing would ever happen like we’ve seen, but I can assure you, it’s not something that we take lightly," he said. "It's something we constantly take a look at."

Harrell urged parents to focus on what they can prevent by paying close attention to what's going on at and around schools and reporting anything even a little suspicious.

"Unfortunately, we’re living in a society where things are happening in schools, things are happening in churches, things are happening in the workplace — they’re happening everywhere," he said. "The things that happened here happened off campus, but all I’m suggesting is … there’s far more things ... that didn’t come to fruition because people talked. And so that's my encouragement."